This man is using his own experiences to inspire others to overcome the fear of death

It's not easy to talk about death – or even think about it, for
that matter. Everyone dies. And it's this simple truth that
strikes some people with tremendous fear.

When a close family member of mine died a couple of years ago, I
remember a whole new world opening up — a world in which life was
fleeting, and therefore, scary.

During that time, I remember asking myself: How does one overcome
the fear of death?

Look no further than Kelvin
Chin, a man who has made it his life's mission to help others do
just that. Beginning in the 1980s, Chin began working with people
on the subject of death and dying, to help improve their quality
of life.

He's a former VP of the American Arbitration Association, and has
held executive roles at top law firms. Now he is the Executive
Director of the Overcoming the Fear of
Death Foundation based in Austin, Texas.

He reminds everyone that his mission began in the worst of ways —
his mother died of lung cancer while he was away at law school.

Getting over such an
emotionally devastating moment in his life was hard, Chin says.
But, he managed to succeed by expressing himself in ways he didn't think
possible.

When people asked him how his
day was going, he would respond with: "You know what, my mom just
died." After a while, people would respond with things like, "Oh
wow, my grandmother died [too]."

Though he's now comfortable
broaching the subject, he says it's been a long process.

Chin's work has become a full
time job as he has talked to hundreds of people in the past 35
years. He says he wants people to "live life to its fullest" and
"live in the present." By doing so, "[people]
can relieve some of
that energy so that [they] can use it for the betterment of
mankind, for the betterment of the planet."

The following is a transcript of
our conversation with
Kelvin Chin. It has been edited for clarity and length.

Business Insider:What influenced you to take
the first step in exploring death?

Kelvin Chin:
So the first step is when my mom died. So my mom died — she was
in her early 50s at the time, I was in my late 20s, early 30s in
law school. It was a difficult time — law school is tough enough.
My mom’s dying. She had started smoking — I asked her when I was
in college, I was like ‘ Mom, when did you start smoking?’ She
was like, '11 years old, in Chinatown, Boston. Everybody starts
smoking, all the kids are smoking.’ She never stopped. I tried to
get her to stop. She stopped for a few months or something, she
was so addicted to smoking. And when she got diagnosed, she was
gone in a matter of months, a very short time. So, emotionally it
was devastating for me ... I had to process that ... and get my
mind around it.

BI: So that’s when you really started forming
an idea on the subject?

KC:I started having conversations with people.
I could see what worked, what didn’t work basically. What was
working for me, did that work for them? That kind of thing. This
was right after law school, and I was in a law firm and so forth
and I had a whole career in law firms and legal services and then
I was the CEO of a company and I did all that, but I’ve continued
having conversations with people about death and dying on the
side. People call me up at night and now I’ve started this
foundation.

BI: How long did it take for you to rationalize
everything and be comfortable with it, or is it still a
process?

KC:I’m comfortable with it, but it’s a process
that’s taken a long time. I mean, I’ve been thinking about this
off and on my whole life. This has been going on for me for a
long time. I’ve been processing this.

BI: How many people have
you helped and talked to on the phone or in person?

KC: Oh, it’s hard to say. Hundreds, for
now, over the last 35 years. I’ve taught meditation to thousands
of peoples since the 1970s, got into the death and dying stuff in
the 80s, and doing it full-time now.

BI: I found it interesting
that people can go to your website and make appointments with you
to talk about overcoming the fear of death. What types of people do you normally speak
to?

KC:All over the map. Every age group— age,
gender, demographic group you can imagine. I mean,
everybody has their own issues, you know. And so I take them from
wherever they’re at. That’s why I’m very adamant about the fact
that I have my own beliefs but you don’t have to believe what I
believe. And I’ll take people from wherever they’re at, a
religious belief or a belief about death and I help them look
through their lens and say ‘Ok, let’s look at this.’ And I can
help you reduce that — maybe even eliminate it. But see, even if
it doesn’t eliminate it, if we can reduce it 10, 15, 20 percent —
that’s huge. The energy that it frees up — people can be spending
time focusing on much better things.

BI: What's your
approach?

There’s basically two
approaches with dealing with the fear of death. One is what I
call the ‘inspiration approach,’ which is the most common
approach, and then there is the understanding approach, which I’m
focusing on. The inspirational approach is not bad, it’s just
very common and it typically goes something like this: ‘Oh, your
grandmother died? Wow man, I’m really sorry to hear that.’ And
it’s genuine, it’s heartfelt, you really mean it. And it’s like,
‘She lived a good life. She’s in a better place.’ Language like
that. We all do that. We’re empathizing with people, and it’s not
bad, but my experience over the last 35 years working with people
is that it tends to be fairly temporary. And it tends to be
fairly case-specific, whereas I found that helping people
understand, get their minds around it a little bit more from an
understanding standpoint tends to be longer lasting and it’s not
so case specific. They can transfer it to another situation
because they have it at different understanding.

BI: What are your thoughts on people like Ray
Kurzweil who are adamant about prolonging their lives and living
past 200, things of that nature?

KC: My thoughts on that are first of all, I’m
all about increasing longevity as long as quality is not
degraded. Longevity for longevity’s sake is, to me, undesirable.
Why would I want to be a decrepit 175 year old? Great, if you
want to break the Guinness World Record, you have another agenda.
I’m into living life. I want to live life to the fullest. Most
people have no idea how old I am, but if you’ve gone on my
website, you can do the math, you can figure it out. But most
people think I’m in my forties. That said, my point is that my
quality of life is high, I want to keep that. So that’s my issue
there. I don’t really know what their objectives are. It might be
consistent with what I’m saying, but quality of life is what’s
important. Let’s live in the present now. Apply oneself and live
now. Live life to it’s fullest. Don’t worry about that. Maybe
you’ll come back in another lifetime, and if you do, you’re
eternal. You’ll have plenty of other opportunities. But even if
you don’t believe that, live life now, that’s the message to
everybody. Flickr/alan-light

BI: What do you tell to people who've reached
the end of the their lives?

KC:I tell people, ‘Look, you can choose to be
sad or you can choose not to be. You want to dwell on that,
that’s your choice.’ I’m a big believer in free will, personal
choice. And it doesn’t matter what age — an year old, 101 years
old. Doesn’t matter. So I encourage people to make choices that
are more healthy for them, that are more supportive for
themselves. And so when somebody says that to me, I say ‘You can
go there and that’s your choice but understand what you’re doing.
So my whole thing is that I come back to understanding. I take a
rational approach towards freeing ourselves from the binding
influence of fear and lack of clarity. That’s why I reference the
whole point of understanding what you are afraid of. Be clear
about what you’re afraid of so you’re not scaring yourself silly
about stuff.by Moyan Brenn on
Flickr

BI: Do you find that some cultures take a
lighter approach to death than others? If so,
why?

KC:I think there’s still an innate fear of
death, regardless of the culture. In fact, after a lecture,
a gentleman came up to me and, I didn’t ask him but just looking
at his features and so forth, he was definitely Asian and he was
asking me a similar question because he was saying in his
country, people believe in past lives and it’s not a big deal.
But, is there fear of death there? Absolutely, there’s still a
fear of death because there’s all this unknown. So, the fear of
death I think is pretty much worldwide regardless of religious
belief, regardless of cultural belief. It’s ubiquitous
unfortunately, and eats up a ton of energy as I said. My whole
goal is to try to relieve some of that energy so that we can use
it for the betterment of mankind, for the betterment of the
planet.

BI: You’re saying it’s better to focus on the
here and now, rather than whatever will happen in the
future.

KC:Absolutely. There’s this phrase in science,
they talk about event horizons. Well, it’s kind of like the
imagination horizon — it’s analogous. The imagination horizon —
each individual has their own imagination horizon. Everybody is
different. Everything past that is the unknown. And people start
imagining, and what they imagine past that horizon is dependent
on how they think. So the more fearful they are, the more fearful
they are going to be about what they are imagining beyond what
they can see.

BI: Does having a religious belief help someone
overcome a fear of death?

KC:Not necessarily. It doesn’t have to be a
religious belief. My approach is an approach of understanding.
How can we understand ourselves better? Turning within,
experiencing who we are. We’re all different. Different minds,
different personalities. There’s a beauty to that. We have to
embrace who we are and get our minds around our own minds so to
speak, and doing that helps to strengthen us on all levels. And
so the fear of death tends to dissipate, the fear of continued
existence tends to dissipate — all fears tend to dissipate as our
internal self-confidence increases. That’s not a religious
notion. That’s not a religious doctrine. That’s just a belief
about going inside first, and then outside.

And quite frankly, even people
who are not into meditation or anything that might be referred to
as turning within, even if people are not into prayer, even if
people are not into any of that, all have the experience of
turning within every night when they go to sleep. So they all
have that experience on some level. And when they wake up in the
morning, they feel a little bit more productive, a little bit
more effective. Well, take that times 10 or times 100 or times
1000. That’s what I’m talking about. To really turn within and
know oneself ... and then you work from the inside out. Your
thoughts and actions become more effective and you become happy
and productive in life.REUTERS/Beawiharta

BI: Has talking about overcoming the fear of
death for many years changed your perspective?

KC:Oh yeah… I’ll say it to you this way. I’ve
come up with this bucket list for myself. You know how people
have these bucket lists, where they want to do this stuff before
they die? My bucket list is for after I die. I want to be
extremely conscious and aware after my body dies. I not only want
to be aware of everything that happens as I transition to
wherever and I do whatever on the other side of the proverbial
veil, and I choose to perhaps come back in another body. I want
to remember everything clearly the next time around. So that’s my
bucket list. I’m insatiably curious about these things and I’ve
had many experiences along that path.

BI: A lot of young people in general do have
this sense of ‘I can do whatever I want’ because of that feeling
of youthfulness…

KC:My experience with this generation of 20
year olds is they’re conscious in a different way that we were
when we were in our 20s. There’s more curiosity, there’s more
openness to a lot of things, a lot of different things. Not that
we weren't, but I find much more receptivity.

BI: What would you say to a 20 year old about
overcoming the fear of death, versus a 95 year
old?

KC:I don’t think that content changes that
much. Because what I’ve experienced is that the ones who have
concern about it who are in their 20s, it’s the same concern. So
I try to clarify their understanding. And it’s applicable to
both. It’s just that the difference is, ‘Wow, I can help
incrementally reduce their fears of death or whatever it is when
they’re 20 years old, and the potential benefit to that mind in
this lifetime is obviously multi-fold.

And quite frankly, from my
standpoint, looking at this the way my foundation is looking at
this, it’s freeing the energy up for more creative thought, more
coming up with the next invention. That’s more likely gonna
happen with the 20 and the 30 year olds than with the 80 year
olds. So I look at this as a long-term project that I’m involved
with now, and if I want to plant seeds, I’m planting seeds with
everybody.